lunes, 19 de julio de 2010

GRAPHICS: Top Secret America, TWPost

---------------------------------------Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin spent two years investigating the government's response to 9/11. Top Secret America explores what they found.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies duplicate work.

Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin spent two years on their investigation, and the resulting series begins this morning at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.

Visit the site for an innovative online reading experience, accompanied by a searchable database of government organizations and corporate contractors that do top-secret work; details on what that work entails; and the cities and states where that work is done.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com:http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/46MP2V/AA0RU/HRNXL/KBUB4V/9QUWL/4O/t

One researcher was funded in part by the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School.

Methodology and credits

The Top Secret America database was put together by compiling hundreds of thousands of public records of government organizations and private-sector companies.

From these records, The Washington Post identified 45 government organizations (for example, the FBI) engaged in top-secret work and determined that those 45 organizations could be broken down into 1,271 sub-units (for example, the Terrorist Screening Center of the FBI). One of the 45 organizations is represented as “unknown”; this category was created as a catchall for companies doing work for a government organization that could not be determined.

At the private-sector level, The Post identified 1,931 companies engaged in top-secret work for the government. Private-sector companies were grouped together and listed by a parent company's name (for example, General Dynamics), even though one company might contain multiple sub-units (for example, General Dynamics Information Technology).

In a case where a large corporation (for example, Boeing) has a distinctly named sub-unit engaged in top-secret work (for example, Boeing's Digital Receiver Technology) the name of the sub-unit was used. In the case of large corporations not primarily in the defense industry (for example, AT&T) that have similarly named sub-units that focus on top-secret work (for example, AT&T Government Solutions), the name of the parent company is used and the name of the sub-unit is noted. For every company listed, revenue and employee data and the date of establishment were drawn from public filings, Dun & Bradstreet data and original reporting.